The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan – #ABookADayInMay Day 10

It’s been a busy day, but I finished an audiobook that I borrowed from the library: The Cement Garden (1978) by Ian McEwan. And boy, what a journey that novella is. I don’t have much time today, so we’re going to do a bullet point post…

• Ian McEwan’s first novel, after one or two volumes of short stories
• I have a checkered history with McEwan, mostly positive – I love Black Dogs, Amsterdam, and Atonement. I like On Chesil Beach and Enduring Love. I thought Saturday was pretty bad, and I haven’t anything he’s published since 2007.
• The Cement Garden is narrated by Jack, aged 13 at the beginning, with an older sister, a younger sister, and a rather younger brother.
• Their father dies – and, a year later, their mother dies. Worried about being taken into care, they decide to encase her body in cement in the cellar – and then begin dysfunctionally living without any supervision.
• Jack’s voice is captivating and convincing, as a young man whose competing concerns make it hard for him to discern or prioritise between the everyday and the shocking.
• I think there’s a very good novella in here about a family of children failing to cope in a terrible situation, and the gradual falling apart of their fragile ecosystem (the addition of Julie’s boyfriend, Derek, is very good at expanding their world and showing how horribly flawed it is).
• But…
• Why does McEwan write such sordid scenes of incestuous sexual encounters between children? What do Jack’s unexplained incestuous desires add to the novella? To me, they just make it self-consciously abhorrent, and detract from a subtler novella hiding within it.
• SO much of the book is preoccupied with bodily fluids, disgusting smells, masterbation – oh gosh, has any literary novelist ever written so obsessively about masterbation? It all feels like a teenager desperately trying to be edgy by simply being unpleasant.
• It got lauded by critics, but tbh it’s hard to tell why. There is the promise of a novelist here, but covered over by the belief that the only way to be real is to be sordid. The sordid is no more real than the beautiful, Ian.
• Here is an excellent quote from Anne Tyler’s review in The New York Times: “these children are not – we trust – real people at all. They are so consistently unpleasant, unlikable and bitter that we can’t believe in them (even hardened criminals, after all, have some good points) and we certainly can’t identify with them. Jack’s eyes, through which we’re viewing this story, have an uncanny ability to settle upon the one distasteful detail in every scene, and to dwell on it, and to allow only that detail to pierce the cotton wool that insulates him. […] It seems weak-stomached to criticize a novel on these grounds, but if what we read makes us avert our gaze entirely, isn’t the purpose defeated?”

I probably haven’t read enough McEwan to do an Unnecessary Rankings! of him, but The Cement Garden would certainly be toying for bottom place.